distributed tracing

Tool taxonomies organise observability by metrics, traces, logs, and profiles. Practitioners organise it by intent: what am I trying to understand, debug, or prove? This article reframes the observability stack around six common intents — Golden Signals, latency propagation, high-cardinality debugging, low-overhead profiling, black-box, and cost-efficient at scale — with the workflows, the right tool combinations, the anti-patterns to avoid, and a dedicated treatment of how unified APM platforms (Datadog, New Relic, Dynatrace) fit in the intent-routing framing.